borroka

16 ms·

181.
by borroka 3y ago
No one has a perfect, comprehensive explanation for why so many people today are overweight and obese. I believe, and I am far from being the only one, there is a cultural component and a caloric component. Real life is not black and white,
182.
by borroka 3y ago
> What can they do aside from reading the drafts and scrutinizing the data/methods/interpretation? You would surprise how few of the big lab's PI's even do that. And since a big lab, say in biology, can send out 40–50
183.
by borroka 3y ago
It is not unusual, and indeed it is what should be expected, for honors to be accompanied by liabilities. Ambitious PI's want bigger labs that lead to the recruitment of better students, who then produce more impactful papers, which th
184.
by borroka 3y ago
Reassessing expectations means, I would say in the vast majority of cases, lowering them, not raising them. I would advise, as always depending on the person and the situation, to make peace with disappointment and to have higher expectatio
185.
by borroka 3y ago
You are comparing doing something with doing nothing, so it is quite likely that doing something gives better results than doing nothing. For a more fair and balanced comparison, you should compare the use of Duolingo with some other "
186.
by borroka 3y ago
Sometimes one can learn from failures. Other times, most of the time I'd say, failure is failure and one ends up, depending on the failure, with less money, less energy, fewer successes. I don't like "failing", I don&#x2
187.
by borroka 3y ago
To make money from "coaching," one must either sell through the Internet, thus potentially reaching thousands to millions of people, or sell expensive individual 1:1 lessons. This bifurcation has been observed, for example, in jiu
188.
by borroka 3y ago
It is interesting that an article about the uselessness of reading (of certain books/articles) leads to wasting more time discussing exactly how useless certain books/articles are. It happens frequently across contexts.
189.
by borroka 3y ago
> I was personally harmed by this woman who was playing games with me Let's assume you were a willing participant. I don't know your situation, how it developed, what kind of tricks they used to make you a consenting person, bu
190.
by borroka 3y ago
> You can learn anything you want Without any quantifier/qualifier, say that "you can learn anything you want" is meaningless. If you are not disabled (broadly speaking), you can learn to run, where running is a way of con
191.
by borroka 3y ago
That may be so. But it is the same when we talk about surgeons and teachers, who, in the collective subconscious, are seen as saintly figures, people who have dedicated themselves to the betterment of society. But the vast majority of surge
192.
by borroka 3y ago
I applied for tech positions in the United States, where I was (and still am) living. I came from a quantitative background and it was quite easy to repurpose my statistical and mathematical modeling into AI/ML. The best thing to do is
193.
by borroka 3y ago
> just found an edtech startup for tertiary education or (post-)graduate level research. How is an edtech startup going to solve post-graduate research, an enterprise that involves millions of people around the world working on all field
194.
by borroka 3y ago
> My complaint about the system being broken is more about the incentive structures and metrics that are used within the academic setting. We have to keep in mind that those incentives, targets, and metrics were set up by the academics t
195.
by borroka 3y ago
I think it's because people who do research are perceived as someone who wants, out of good heart, to provide a benefit to humanity. "How can you not want me to work on this enzyme pathway that can explain how this very rare and a
196.
by borroka 3y ago
> and I would not think of them very much after a few days To me, it sounds like the definition of a fungible cog, where "fully" depends on whether a replacement with the same skills can be hired. One is expected to be function
197.
by borroka 3y ago
I was referring to "system broken" with respect to many PhDs with ambitions of an academic career having to leave academia because there are not enough tenure-track positions available. With respect to that problem, it would be eq
198.
by borroka 3y ago
I think having trouble finding a postdoc is a good outcome of the process, the incentives in this case are working properly. Postdoc positions were designed as a short bridge between a PhD and a tenure-track position, not as a long-term cru
199.
by borroka 3y ago
First, a postdoc on the way out of academia is not going to fix academia. Second, how is the system broken? There are mismanaged resources, some nepotism (in the U.S., a lot of nepotism if we look at countries other than the U.S. or the lik
200.
by borroka 3y ago
> There are jobs that I can do certainly, but very few that I’ve thought would given me the internal satisfaction of what academia used to give me (and I think could give me again). My comment is not meant to be advice-column material, b
201.
by borroka 3y ago
This is one of the reasons I stopped informally mentoring postdocs. It was an exercise in frustration. It was like telling someone who had only had one husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend in their life (and now has left or is l
202.
by borroka 3y ago
> But please don't think that nobody cares about you in your workplace and you're a completely fungible cog. It's a horrible life to live. Let's not tell the already cynical young people that this is how the world wor
203.
by borroka 3y ago
> First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do. I suspect there are many jobs you would do, but you have to allow yourself to let go of the dreams, the ambitions, the identity you have built in academia. A few years ago, almost sev
204.
by borroka 3y ago
That's not how effect sizes, in statistics, are estimated. But, yes, I used a hyperbole, it is a classic tool of rhetoric. I could have said that they just learn how to ask for a coffee, or the directions for the Eiffel Tower. The mean
205.
by borroka 3y ago
It was a hyperbole. But among the people (about 20) who have told me they have used Duolingo to (try to) learn my native language, I have yet to find one who can say more than a few disconnected words. And among the people I have seen who a
206.
by borroka 3y ago
> If the claim is "30min of structured learning with duolingo will get you no closer to learning a language than 30 min of mindlessly scrolling facebook cat videos", I don't believe that's true. And THAT is the correc
207.
by borroka 3y ago
A rather poor argument from the psychologist. If you open any newspaper or magazine, every week/two issues there are recommendations/suggestions/new ideas on how to improve sleep or why we sleep. Similarly, if you open any ne
208.
by borroka 3y ago
From a statistical point of view, I agree that there is a lot of interesting and impactful work to be done on estimating predictive intervals, more in ML than in traditional statistical modeling. I have more doubts when it comes to actions
209.
by borroka 3y ago
That's exactly what I was talking about. The nature of the uncertainly intervals is made even more nebulous when not using formal notation, something I was guilty of doing in my comment--even if I used the word "loosely" for
210.
by borroka 3y ago
But even in academia, where supposedly "true science" is, if not done, at least pursued, uncertainty intervals are rarely, with respect to the times they would be needed, understood and used. When I used to publish stats- and math

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